Our recent discussions about syllabicity ("Readings" below) made me wonder whether it's possible to have syllables, words, and whole sentences without vowels. That led me to this example from Nuxalk on Omniglot: Sample clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' / xłp̓χʷłtłpłłskʷc̓ IPA transcription xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ Translation Then he had had in his possession a bunchberry plant. This is an example of […]
Joe Farrell wrote in to ask: Do you know whether the word "handbook" (Gk encheiridion, Lat (liber) manualis) can be found in any other ancient or medieval languages? And, if so, whether it is clearly a loan word or it simply arises spontaneously in different languages from a similar conceptual and material relationship between books […]
Listen to this sound, and describe it in the comments below: Your browser does not support the audio element. You can learn what the sound is, and why I care how you hear it, after the fold.
The old hymn and blues song of that title have been very much on my mind during the last couple of months. George Hunt Smyttan (1856) Forty days and forty nights You were fasting in the wild; Forty days and forty nights, Tempted, and yet undefiled…. Muddy Waters (1956) Forty days and forty nights, since […]
Changing norms about public display of certain words, as exemplified in the display windows of a local store:
At dinner the other night, someone asked whether Cossack and Kazakh are etymological descendants from the same source. The consensus around the table was "probably yes", but no one really knew anything. A bit of internet research supports that conclusion — though no doubt readers will be able to add depth and nuance.
Below is a guest post by Tihomir Rangelov. The Korean film Parasite’s landslide success at the Oscars this year has been called "a cultural breakthrough". Was it a linguistic breakthrough as well?
In "Syllables" (2/24/2020), I showed that a very simple algorithm finds syllables surprisingly accurately, at least in good quality recordings like a soon-to-published corpus of Mandarin Chinese. Commenters asked about languages like Berber and Salish, which are very far from the simple onset+nucleus pattern typical of languages like Chinese, and even about English, which has […]
Notice the button on Andy Warhol's jacket: Source: The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 4 (Paintings and Sculptures Late 1974-1976).
Tweet from Joshua Wong 黃之鋒, Secretary-General of Demosistō: Here is Winnie The Flu that we call as #WTF Credit to Yeahman Tse via Legend Bricks LEGO Forum pic.twitter.com/q04K7QfAku — Joshua Wong 黃之鋒 😷 (@joshuawongcf) February 24, 2020
From a physical point of view, syllables reflect the fact that speaking involves oscillatory opening and closing of the vocal tract at a frequency of about 5 Hz, with associated modulation of acoustic amplitude. From an abstract cognitive point of view, each language organizes phonological features into a sort of grammar of syllabic structures, with […]